M3 (NGC 5272) is a big globular cluster just barely in the boundaries of the constellation Canes Venatici (Hunting Dogs). At magnitude 6.2 it is just naked-eye-visible under dark skies. Messier’s search for comet-like objects starting with M3 led him to catalog the objects up to M40 in 1764.

M3

This time of year (April) the Milky Way is on the horizon, for us now as it was for Messier then, when we look straight up we’re looking straight out of the Galaxy. The galactic pole is straight up in Coma Berenices.

Also this time of year it doesn’t get fully dark until nearly 10:00 in south/central Utah.

North (toward Polaris) is up in the photo. The picture was taken with a fully modified Canon Rebel camera (this is my one shot color camera) on a TEC 140 telescope in the Alpenglow-Torrey House Observatory in the dark sky community of Torrey, Utah (Bortle 2-3). The ten best of 14 45-second sub-frames were used and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker = 7.5 minute photo. Unguided, binned 2X2 in the SkyX (to make smaller files for internet transfer), no calibration frames. Processed in Photoshop (CS5).

Location in the night sky of the photo:

Source: Astrometry.net